Legal battle with Eddie Alvarez could be a lose-lose for Bellator

There’s something so uniquely sad about seeing a pro fighter dragged into court over contract disputes. It’s the same breed of sadness I feel whenever people dress up their cats in people clothes. One look at the spectacle, and you can see how wrong it is, how unhappy it makes everyone involved, how even the best outcome is still sort of a loss.

And yet, unless something changes soon, it looks like former Bellator lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez is headed for just such a court battle. UFC President Dana White warned that the situation was going to “get ugly,” and it has. Chances are it will get uglier still before it’s all over, and, at least for Bellator, I can’t help but wonder whether this isn’t one of those situations in which the harder you fight, the deeper you sink.

For those of you just getting caught up, the quick and dirty facts of the case go something like this: Alvarez’s recently expired Bellator contract gives his employers the right to match any contract he’s offered by a competitor. The UFC offered Alvarez what, by all indications, seems like a pretty sweet deal, and Bellator matched it. Or at least, that’s what Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney claims.

According to Rebney, who I spoke with late Monday afternoon, the contract Bellator offered Alvarez is “exactly the same deal with the same figures and the same numbers” as the one offered by the UFC. According to Alvarez, who aired his grievances on Monday’s “MMA Hour” with Ariel Helwani, Bellator’s matching offer is like a meal at McDonald’s compared to the UFC’s offer to take him out for lobster.

How can this be? When is a matching offer not a matching offer? The way Rebney told it, Bellator didn’t just offer Alvarez a comparable deal, it offered him identical wording on an identical contract.

“As a matter of fact,” Rebney told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com), “we didn’t just match it, we took the UFC contract, took it out of the PDF format, changed the UFC name to the Bellator name, and put a signature to it.”

If Alvarez would have signed it, Rebney added, Bellator would have sent him a check for $250,000 the next day to match the signing bonus the UFC had offered him. It would also have given him $70,000 to show and another $70,000 to win in his first fight, just like the UFC. The trouble is, those aren’t the only ways to make money in the UFC, and every fighter knows it.

For one thing, there’s the possibility of future pay-per-view cuts. There are also the discretionary bonuses the UFC loves to hand out, extra money the UFC gives away – or so White likes to brag – even when it doesn’t have to. But that’s all hypothetical, for the purposes of the contract. That’s not guaranteed money that Bellator is required to match, which is probably how you end up with one party feeling like it’s fulfilled its legal obligations and the other party feeling like he’s just been handed a McRib as a substitute for a steak.

As familiar as we all are with narrative of the big, bad, scumbag fight promoter – and as ready as we typically are to side with a fighter who claims that he’s being screwed by the guys in suits who are interfering with his ability to feed his family – I’m not sure how well that holds up here. I’m also not sure it matters, at least in the court of public opinion, which is why this is shaping up to be a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Consider it from Bellator’s perspective for a second. As Rebney put it: “When we entered into the contract with Eddie, when we handed him the first $100,000 check, we negotiated in a clause that said, hey, when this ends, even though it’s years from now, we want to be able to match word for word and dollar for dollar what somebody else gives you. We don’t want to be in a position to give you less. We just want to know that after we invest all this time and all this money into you and your career, we can stay in the game if we’re willing to give you exactly what somebody else is willing to give you. And that’s what we did.”

It’s tough to argue with that logic. After all, how can Bellator expect to last as an MMA promotion if it’s just building future UFC stars with no option to retain their services after it’s done the heavy lifting of promoting the guy? And how can you expect Bellator – a company that has not put on a single pay-per-view event yet (though Rebney won’t rule it out in the future, he said) – to offer exactly the same deal in both hard numbers and hypothetical ones as a competitor with a different business model?

But then, there’s Alvarez on the “MMA Hour,” calling in via Skype with his kids’ toys visible in the background, explaining precisely how depressing it is to think about spending what might be the best years of his career in a protracted court battle. Even if Bellator has a legit claim to keep him there, how are you not supposed to sympathize with the guy whose window of opportunity may be rapidly closing? And just how great of a victory would it really be for Bellator if Alvarez is eventually forced to accept the matching offer?

That’s the thing about contracts. You can make a man adhere to one, but you can’t force him to be happy about it. And if Bellator does win, but the perception in the MMA universe is that Alvarez is stuck in a deal he doesn’t like all because of the legal maneuvering of a heartless fight promoter, that seems worse than letting him go to the UFC. It gives the UFC fodder for claims that Bellator’s contracts are somehow morally wrong for containing the same provisions as its own, and it makes up-and-coming fighters think twice about getting locked down in a deal with Bellator.

The problem is, fight promoters can’t afford too much sentimentality, as Rebney was quick to point out.

“Sometimes people forget this is a business,” he said. ” … From the very first day we started this company, we’ve approached it as a business. We’ve not approached it from an emotional point of view or from a pure fan perspective. We approached it as a business, and I knew going in it was a hyper-competitive business.”

In other words, don’t cry for Alvarez if the worst thing that happens to him is he has to cash a check for a quarter-of-a-million dollars without the promise of hypothetical points on a hypothetical pay-per-view. It is, after all, the deal he signed.

Asking him to honor it now seems reasonable. It seems justifiable. But in a sport in which good guys and bad guys are determined more by the will of the fans than by the ink on a contract, I’m not sure how much it will help. When it comes to public perception, you can be right and still end up looking wrong.